Beethoven Variations Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

‘God invents curious torture for his favourites’

(Ruth Padel)

Ludwig van Beethoven

(1770–1827)

String Quartet in F major, Op. 18 No. 1

Allegro con brio

Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato

Scherzo: Allegro molto

Allegro

‘Four voices, each on their own wild ride.

A to-and-fro, an either-or, a yes-and-no.

A family conversation.’

When Beethoven began work on his set of six Op. 18 string quartets in 1798, outwardly everything appeared to be going extremely well for him. His move from his native German city of Bonn to the Austrian capital Vienna six years previously had clearly been a decisive step in the right direction. In the city of Mozart and Haydn he was received warmly and soon built up a starry reputation as a pianist and improviser and, increasingly, as a composer. He had attracted the attention of wealthy and influential aristocrats, one of whom, Prince Karl Alois von Lichnowsky, began paying him an annual allowance while he was working on the Op. 18 quartets, and gave him a present of four beautiful string instruments. But the quartets bear a dedication to another important Beethoven champion, Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz, who, like Lichnowsky, had begun supporting the composer soon after the latter’s arrival in Vienna.

Composing was never as easy for Beethoven as it was for his teacher Haydn, with whom he had a somewhat fractious relationship. Normally Beethoven didn’t revise his works after he’d arrived at what he considered a definitive final version, but the first of the Op. 18 quartets, the F major, was revised extensively two years later. ‘I have greatly changed it,’ Beethoven wrote to his friend Karl Amenda, ‘for only now have I learned how to write quartets properly.’ Any sense of triumph in that remark is soon dashed by an evidently painfully-wrought confession (in the letter it’s underlined): ‘I beg you to keep the matter of my deafness a profound secret to be confided to nobody, no matter whom.’ Already we can see the effects of the tragic ailment that would eventually destroy Beethoven’s concert career and force him into ever deeper spiritual isolation.

What was it about writing quartets that Beethoven had to take such trouble to learn? The example of his former teacher Haydn – still alive and writing magnificent quartets at this time – was paramount. Haydn had not exaggerated – or at least not much – when he’d announced to the world in 1781 that his set of six Op. 33 quartets were written ‘in a new and special way’. In these marvellous works he had transformed the combination of two violins, viola and cello from a conveniently economical ensemble, a kind of miniature orchestra, into a musical identity in its own right. The sense of intimate, dynamic ‘family conversation’ between four solo voices, described so beautifully in the words of Ruth Padel, isn’t just an attractive surface feature of the music – it’s essential to the musical argument, its spiritual journey.

One can see this in the opening moments of Op. 18 No. 1. At first Beethoven teases us by pretending that he hasn’t learned his lesson after all. The four instruments play the opening idea in unison, twice. But gradually the individual voices make their characters known: the first violin, then the second in dialogue with the first, then the cello, again in dialogue, then the viola, likewise in exchange with the leader. The feeling that the four instruments are bouncing ideas off each other is a vital constituent element in this movement’s playfulness, wit and drama.

Drama of a very different kind pervades the slow second movement which, according to Karl Amenda, was written with the scene in the burial vault from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet very much in mind. In the sketches for this movement Beethoven wrote the words ‘les derniers soupirs’ (‘the last sighs’), which do seem to bear that out. It begins with what sounds like a tragic aria for the first violin, but even before it has ended the other instruments begin to make their presence more felt, gently questioning, urgently challenging, or attempting tender consolation.

The rapid Scherzo comes as a refreshing release after such dark utterances. It was Haydn who had developed the scherzo as a faster, more dynamic alternative to the Classical courtly minuet, but it was Beethoven who made this form utterly his own. Like so many of his later scherzos, this one delights in surprise – little twists of rhythm or harmony that seem to twitch the carpet under our feet. More conventionally for the time, the finale is lightweight and shorter than either of the first two movements; but in the revision Beethoven changed the tempo from a relatively comfortable Allegretto to a more driven Allegro. Already he is beginning to sense that his ideal finale has to be more than just a pleasantly entertaining send-off.

String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132

Assai sostenuto – Allegro

Allegro ma non tanto

Molto adagio

Alla marcia, assai vivace –

Allegro appassionato

‘Without the dark we’d never see the stars.’

By the time Beethoven came to write his A minor Quartet, Op. 132, in 1824–5, his hearing was almost entirely destroyed, and the physical sound of the instruments for which he was writing was a distant memory. Verbal contact with other human beings was conducted largely through the medium of his famous Conversation Books, in which friends and colleagues wrote questions and Beethoven would (sometimes) write his replies. There had been other huge disappointments – his failure to find a ‘faithful wife’ (as hymned so movingly in his opera Fidelio), the collapse of his youthful democratic ideals after the bloody failure of the French Revolution and the defeat of Napoleon by the forces of the ‘old order’ in 1815 – but nothing affected him so keenly as his loss of hearing. It was a very long time since he had been able to partake in the to-ing and fro-ing of ‘family conversation’. In his music, and particularly in his string quartets, Beethoven is now, in the words of the novelist Thomas Mann, the ‘lonely prince of a realm of spirits.’ The dialogue is now within himself – a profound self-communing. The ‘voices’ are now those of Beethoven himself, his internal contradictions and conflicts, and of the ‘God’ he sensed, mysteriously, at the core of his being.

Op. 132 is one of three ambitious string quartets Beethoven wrote in 1824–6 for Prince Nikolas Galitzin, a wealthy amateur musician from St Petersburg. For their premieres the Prince assembled a small audience of acknowledged connoisseurs, entrusting the music to the formidable Schuppanzigh Quartet, whose leader was Ignaz Schuppanzigh – former teacher and old friend of Beethoven. The Quartet knew Beethoven’s style and thought processes as well as anyone, and had followed his development closely into this late period, when popular interest in him appeared to be on the decline. Beethoven knew that under such circumstances he could take risks that he might never be able to bring off in the public concert hall, but even so the demands he makes of his audience in these works are intense: these are long, complex pieces, in each of which a multi-voiced, sometimes enigmatic narrative unfolds. In the case of the A minor Quartet it’s evident that this music has a story to unfold, a deeply serious story – but what kind of message does it convey?

The opening of the A minor Quartet is particularly enigmatic. It starts with the four strings in slow, quiet imitation – rather like the slow, hushed fugue that opens the previous quartet, Op. 131 in C sharp minor. But suddenly the first violin dismisses this with a kind of nervous flourish and the cello begins a plaintive song, soon taken over by the leader. Mystery and anguished striving alternate in the firmly minor-key first movement, but then the minuet-like second seems to open out onto another, sunnier world: restrained, full of orderly, almost old-world courtly dialogue between the four instruments. The central trio is another contrast: the music still rarely raises its voice, but the texture is dominated by an ethereal hurdy-gurdy-like solo for the first violin, apparently unfazed by two moments of curious protest from the viola and cello towards its end.

Beethoven called the astonishing central slow movement ‘Sacred song of thanks to the Godhead from a convalescent, in the Lydian mode’. The ‘Lydian mode’ is a kind of scale used in Renaissance choral church music but deemed archaic in Beethoven’s time. To get a clearer idea, imagine a scale on a keyboard using only the white notes, but beginning and ending on F, instead of the usual C. The hint of choral polyphony in the Quartet’s nervy opening is now taken up and transformed into rapt, sustained contemplation. Twice this alternates with faster, more dance-like sections marked ‘Neue Kraft fühlend’ – ‘Feeling new strength’. On its third appearance the slow choral-like music builds to an ecstatic climax, before sinking finally to a strange kind of peace. Tormented by both physical and mental ailments, Beethoven knew what Friedrich Nietzsche called ‘the dialectic of sickness and recovery’ as well as any human being, but this is perhaps his greatest expression of the sense of returning to life, colored as it is by the memory of pain.

Next comes a complete surprise. A jaunty march launches what appears to be the finale, but this is soon edged out of the way by an impassioned violin recitative. After a brief pause the unmistakably tragic ‘real’ finale begins. Its impassioned violin melody is in fact a reworking a of a theme Beethoven had originally considered using in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony (1823) – only to discard it in favor of the famous ‘Ode to Joy’. In the Symphony the ‘Ode to Joy’ theme likewise follows an intensely dramatic instrumental recitative. This raises a provocative question. Beethoven is said to have had his doubts about whether the choral ‘Ode to Joy’ was the ‘right’ finale for the Ninth Symphony. Can we therefore see the inclusion of its original tragic theme in the A minor Quartet as a kind of ‘Ninth Symphony Take Two’? If so, is Beethoven telling us that the message of hope expressed so emphatically in the Ninth Symphony was in fact a mistake – that his doubts about humanity’s future go deeper? Sunlight seems to return towards the end of the Quartet, but there is hardly a conventional ‘happy ending’; a sense of ambiguity, perhaps even irony, lingers. This is music that raises questions, yet they are questions which, many have found, can draw us back to explore this many-faceted, richly challenging, yet ultimately uplifting music again and again.

BEETHOVEN VARIATIONS

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